Focus on IDPs in the capital

A man from southern Iraq, 39-year-old Irhaf Nahhas, now living in a former elite military headquarters says he does not fear followers of former President Saddam Hussein. He goes on to tell, however, that after Saddam’s special fida'iyin troops destroyed his traditional reed house after his son was caught trying to avoid military service, his family had nowhere to live. Nahhas comes from the marshlands around the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq, which were deliberately drained by the Saddam regime for political reasons. When Saddam’s government was toppled in May, Nahhas moved his family to the former Republican Guard headquarters just outside the capital, Baghdad. "If we have no house, there’s no way to live in Maysan [Governorate]," said Nahhas, a former fisherman. "There was no opportunity there." He and his neighbours were now getting help from the aid group Premiere Urgence under an expanded definition of what it means to be an internally displaced person (IDP), said Baptiste Martin, coordinator of the French NGO's IDP project. Martin said his agency also assisted poor and vulnerable people, operating at 270 locations in and around Baghdad. About 10,400 people now living in Baghdad are IDPs, according to Martin, due to the recent war, for human rights/ethnicity-related reasons, or because something happened to their houses before the war. Premiere Urgence wants to repair the former military camp’s infrastructure to enable its residents to have electricity, running water, sewage disposal facilities and a small school, Iraq. But there may be hitches. "If we rehabilitate the camp and give them one year for free, it will increase the problem," Martin told IRIN. "We may make them pay US $30 to $40 in rent right now. They could afford to pay something," he added. In fact, many of the families in the camp said they had paid $500 or more for their homes - basically for the right to squat in government buildings. Most agreed that the buildings they occupied did not belong to them, but none of them was willing to move out unless some future government officials forced them to do so. "Our future here is unclear, but the situation in our former city was worse, with people killing each other for revenge, for water, for land," Layla Hathal, the wife of the sheikh who is the group's informal leader, told IRIN. "If the government asks us to leave, we have to. Otherwise, I’ll stay here," she said. Layla said her family had paid about $300 to another family as a premium to move into a stucco building with an arbour of greenery over the front door. They had paid another $400 or so to replace glass in the windows that had been looted, and to build a simple stone wall around the house. But Layla's eight-year-old daughter, Nur, is unhappy in the new neighbourhood, which is right next to the highway and very far away from the school she used to attend and her former playmates. "I lost my friends. I liked Maysan and I want to go back to school there," Nur told IRIN. Some Marsh Arabs, or Madan, want to return to the south, but many of those in the Republican Guard camp want a better life for their children, saying they had been marginalised by the former regime. "Our kids were deprived of the most simple education," Hashim Musa told IRIN. "My 13-year-old brother is illiterate. So I think we should stay here. We need to develop." The members of the group might traditionally be farmers and fishermen, but now people wanted to make new lives, said a 30-year-old neighbour of Musa’s. "Ninety percent of us are peasants, but I don’t like farming," he told IRIN. "I’m a trader. I have a car and I can sell things." More than six months after the fall of the former regime, there are still social upheavals, with families moving from place to place in search of new homes. "Many of these people have been moved several times," Martin said. "It’s a really crazy situation." Premiere Urgence is starting up an information centre to help people who have claims to homes or land they owned to start the legal process to get them back. An Iraqi claims commission was expected to start working by September 2004, but the process could take years, Martin said, pointing to the continuing confusion in Kosovo, where Albanians and Serbs often moved out of their own houses into empty houses in other communities with people of the same ethnicity. Under Saddam’s Arabisation project, many Arabs were relocated to northern Iraq. In recent months, many Kurds in the north evicted Arabs from houses the former said belonged to Kurds. Similar things happened in other parts of the country, with people being evicted from land they had been given by the former regime for fighting in the war against Iran. "We don’t want them to hope too much about this project," Martin explained. "It’s easy to put money on the table for a house, but you can have two families that have the same right to a house," he added.